We present new radial velocity and X-ray observations of extremely low mass (ELM, ~0.2 M &sun;) white dwarf (WD) candidates in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 area. We identify seven new binary systems with 1-18 hr orbital periods. Five of the systems will merge due to gravitational wave radiation within 10 Gyr, bringing the total

We have performed accurate iron abundance measurements for 44 red giants (RGs) in the Carina dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxy. We used archival, high-resolution spectra (R˜38,000) collected with UVES at ESO/VLT either in slit mode (five RGs) or in fiber mode (39 RGs, FLAMES/GIRAFFE-UVES). The sample is more than a factor of 4 larger than any previous

Context. We present additional constraints on the galaxy luminosity function at z ~ 9 based on observations carried out with ESO/VLT FORS2, HAWK-I, and X-Shooter around the lensing cluster A2667, as part of our project designed to select z ~ 7-10 candidates accessible to spectroscopy. We find that only one selected J-dropout source in this field

Context. The quantitative study of the physical properties and chemical abundances of large samples of massive blue stars at different metallicities is a powerful tool to understand the nature and evolution of these objects. Their analysis beyond the Milky Way is challenging, nonetheless it is doable and the best way to investigate their behavior

We compare the results of various cosmological gas-dynamical codes used to simulate the formation of a galaxy in the Λ cold dark matter structure formation paradigm. The various runs (13 in total) differ in their numerical hydrodynamical treatment [smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH), moving mesh and adaptive mesh refinement] but share the same

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